If your brand is not on Instagram, it should be. Instagram is beautifully simplistic and the most personal of the mobile platforms. It’s full of potential with people eager to connect with a brand on a more intimate and tangible level.
Creating content for Instagram can be a challenge, it’s true. The importance of visual imagery is key to tell a brand’s story, any brand. Regardless of the industry, any company can create campaigns to utilize this platform to reach their targeted audience, sharing alluring imagery and creative captions.
There are many companies getting it right, using this platform to share their story, their background, and their vision.
A recent study by Forrester Research found that Instagram users were 58 times more likely to like, comment, or share a brand’s post than Facebook users and 120 times more likely than Twitter users. All data indicates that users are moving away from Twitter and Facebook and shifting their time to Instagram. This absolutely proves that Instagram is the best social and mobile platform for brands to reach audiences that are willing to engage. If you’re not marketing on Instagram, you’re missing out.
The reason for this unusually high engagement is driven by the consumer, as they crave to visually share their stories, reactions, and experiences–Instagram offers a platform for this with its unique ability to highlight visual content (and all marketers know that visual content is king).
Content on Instagram is simply more sharable, easier to understand, and far more universal than other types of content.
Visual storytelling is an art form on Instagram, and to be able to craft a conversation over an extended period of time is a skill that needs to be harnessed. In order to capture the attention of that audience you must be active on the platform, creating content that is not only engaging but also shareable for your target audience.
Instagram is built on the backbone of quality images. The wonderful world of developers are making it easier to hack instagram through amazing photo editing apps that go beyond the normal instagram filters. Yes, there are lots of images on instagram that are of poor quality but those that go viral and generate significant engagement tend to be those that have high quality.
As a brand, it’s important to care about quality photography. That’s the medium in which Instagram operates, so you need to cut through the high quantity of poor photos and provide high quality images that spark emotion, engagement and brand awareness.
The popularity of Instagram came about because the social media platform stuck with its core principal functions that it has done so well with. It is one of the easiest social platforms for driving engagements. It allows people to easily share what they are doing with friends. Instagram makes people have the feeling that they are professional photographers and people will always want to come back to what they feel good about. These two combinations have made Instagram a very important social media network in 2017. Instagram is also free, it’s fun and easy to use and most importantly, it is instant. The social network platform makes it easy for people to be creative and this is essential. With Instagram, ordinary objects are easily transformed into works of art and shared with friends and the world.
Today, consumers make purchases of goods and services because of what they see on their Instagram feed. What this means is that companies have had to adapt because social media influence is a much more effective approach in determining consumer habits. Advertising efforts have now shifted and are social media based advertising campaigns are the thing of the future. This new paradigm is an indicator of the importance of the influence of social media. For brand social engagement, Instagram is the number one app in the last two years. It has numbers that are higher than Facebook and Twitter and this is a very significant development.
Instagram can drive results when it used appropriately. It’s important to identify and analyze your overarching digital plan and determine whether or not instagram is a good fit for your audience. From there, if you determine that instagram is a good fit and that you can connect with your audience using this channel.
Braithwait Gets Customers Involved By Showcasing Their Photos On Site
Braithwait also collects customer photos and combines these with photos from their Instagram to show in a dedicated gallery on site.
This is a perfect example of how you can connect multiple channels through Instagram photos, as Braithwait includes a button to go straight to their Instagram to see the photos.
Lessons for Others
Marketing is about reaching consumers to invoke a change in their behavior, giving them a call to action. The only way to truly make that shift in perception is to be where people are engaging and spending time
Instagram can drive results when it used appropriately. It’s important to identify and analyze your overarching digital plan and determine whether or not instagram is a good fit for your audience. From there, if you determine that instagram is a good fit and that you can connect with your audience using this channel.
By building an engagement strategy, planning content, monitoring your competitive set and measuring your performance with Instagram analytics such as likes, comments and engagement rate, you can and will create a resonant content and engagement strategy for your brand on “the happiest place on the internet.”
Organization:
Instagram
Industry:
Social Network Service
Name of Organization Contact:
Kevin Systrom. CEO & Co-founder of Instagram
Authored by: Hersh
If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.